Question

West Coast Architects (WCA) has been operating for the last ten years now. No longer the new kid on the block, the organization has steadily become more professional during your time here.
Five years ago, the company had 50 employees and now has grown to 100 staff in Vancouver, Calgary, and Toronto. You have been successful in your career as a people manager practicing what you learned in your s many years ago. You are managing an HR Department that is based out of Vancouver and has a mixture of recruiters, HR consultants, and payroll staff. You silently take stock of your situation and marvel at how lucky it has been to grow with a company that has really appreciated your contributions. That brass name plaque on your office door could use some polishing as its developing some patina!

question

The Partners have been debating an issue at the last board meeting. WCA is losing market share to a new savvy upstart in Toronto, and it has asked you to help identify the main reasons why the Partners have having such a tough time identifying the problem. Describe three barriers that might cause the Partners to poorly identify the problem(s). An illustrative example in this context should be included for each barrier. Make sure to compliment this by providing the partners with tools and processes in their meetings to help deal with their challenges of identifying problems.

Answer 1

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The grapevine is an unstructured and informal network founded on social relationships rather than organizational charts or job descriptions. Employees turn to the rumour when they have few other options.

Research conducted several decades ago reported that the grapevine transmits information very rapidly in all directions throughout the organization. The typical pattern is a cluster chain, whereby a few people actively spread rumours to many others. The grapevine works through informal social networks, so it is more active where employees have similar backgrounds and can communicate easily. Nevertheless, the grapevine distorts information by deleting fine details and exaggerating key points.

Employees rely on the grapevine when information is not available through formal channels. It is also the main conduit through which organizational stories and other symbols of the organization's culture are communicated. A third benefit of the grapevine is that this social interaction relieves anxiety. This explains why rumour mills are most active during times of uncertainty. Finally, the grapevine is associated with the drive to bond. Being a recipient of gossip is a sign of inclusion, according to evolutionary psychologists. Trying to suppress the rumour is, in some respects, an attempt to undermine the natural human drive for social interaction.

Having those definitions in mind, we can agree that the grapevine can be something beneficial when appropriately used by any company. That is the way that message is passed through by most of the employees in all organizations, and way more with social media right beside us. One way to keep the grapevine but at the same time making sure that employees have the correct information on hands I would suggest an Organization Communication Board, where the company's Internal Communication would be responsible for putting up important messages from top management to the rest of the staff. In that way, the organization can still trust in the speed of the grapevine and not be worried about the lack of details on that same message.

Creativity is at work when imagining opportunities, such as how a company's expertise might be redirected to untapped markets. Creativity is present when developing alternatives, such as figuring out new places to look for existing solutions or working out the design of a custom-made solution. One of the most critical conditions that support creative practice is that the organization has a learning orientation; that is, leaders recognize that employees make reasonable mistakes as part of the creative process.

Motivation from the job itself is another essential condition for creativity. Employees tend to be more creative when they believe their work benefits the organization - task significance - and when they have the freedom to pursue novel ideas without bureaucratic delays. Creativity is about changing things, and change is possible only when employees have the authority to experiment. More generally, jobs encourage creativity when they are challenging and aligned with the employee's competencies.

Hiring people with strong creative potential and providing a work environment that supports creativity are two foundations of an innovative workplace. The third foundation consists of various activities that help employees think more creatively.

By verbalizing the problem, listening to questions, and hearing what others think, you are more likely to form new perspectives on the issue. A set of creative activities that can be very helpful, known as associative play, ranges from art classes to improvised storytelling and acting. Another associative play activity, called morphological analysis, involves listing different dimensions of a system and the elements of each aspect and then looking at each combination. This encourages people to examine combinations that initially seem nonsensical carefully. The last set of activities that promote creative thinking is cross-pollination. Cross-pollination occurs when people from different areas of the organization exchange ideas or when new people are brought into an existing team.

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